“And the alternative?”
“Bag you and tag you and put you back in the freezer,” Da Silva went on. “Same as all the others. Your choice, of course. Work with us, become part of the team, or go back into hibernation and take your chances there.”
“We need to be on our way.” Clausen said. “Don’t want to keep Nero waiting on F.”
“Who’s Nero?” Gaunt asked.
“Last one we pulled out before you,” Da Silva said.
They walked down the corridor, passing a set of open double doors that led into some kind of mess room or commons. Men and women of various ages were sitting around tables, talking quietly as they ate meals or played card games. Everything looked spartan and institutional, from the plastic chairs to the formica-topped surfaces. Beyond the tables, a rain-washed window framed only a rectangle of grey cloud. Gaunt caught a few glances directed his way, a flicker of waning interest from one or two of the personnel, but no one showed any fascination in him. The three of them walked on, ascending stairs to the next level of whatever kind of building they were in. An older man, Chinese looking, passed in the opposite direction, carrying a grease-smeared wrench. He raised his free hand to Clausen in a silent high-five, Clausen reciprocating. Then they were up another level, passing equipment lockers and electrical distribution cabinets, and then up a spiral stairwell that emerged into a draughty, corrugated-metal shed smelling of oil and ozone. Incongruously, there was an inflatable orange life-preserver on one wall of the shed, an old red fire extinguisher on the other.
This is the twenty-third century, Gaunt told himself. As dispiriting as the surroundings were, he had no reason to doubt that this was the reality of life in twenty-two seventeen. He supposed it had always been an article of faith that the world would improve, that the future would be better than the past, shinier and cleaner and faster, but he had not expected to have his nose rubbed in the unwisdom of that faith quite so vigorously.
There was one door leading out of the corrugated-metal shed. Clausen pushed it open against wind, then the three of them stepped outside. They were on the roof of something. There was a square of cracked and oil-stained concrete, marked here and there with lines of fading red paint. A couple of seagulls pecked disconsolately at something in the corner. At least they still had seagulls, Gaunt thought. There hadn’t been some awful, life-scouring bio-catastrophe, forcing everyone to live in bunkers.
Sitting on the middle of the roof was a helicopter. It was matte black, a lean, waspish thing made of angles rather than curves, and aside from some sinister bulges and pods, there was nothing particularly futuristic about it. For all Gaunt knew, it could have been based around a model that was in production before he went under.
“You’re thinking: shitty looking helicopter,” Clausen said, raising her voice over the wind.
He smiled quickly. “What does it run on? I’m assuming the oil reserves ran dry sometime in the last century?”
“Oil,” Clausen said, cracking open the cockpit door. “Get in the back, buckle up. Da Silva rides up front with me.”
Da Silva slung his zip-up bag into the rear compartment where Gaunt was settling into his position, more than a little apprehensive about what lay ahead. He looked between the backs of the forward seats at the cockpit instrumentation. He’d been in enough private helicopters to know what the manual override controls looked like and there was nothing weirdly incongruous here.
“Where are we going?”
“Running a shift change,” Da Silva said, wrapping a pair of earphones around his skull. “Couple of days ago there was an accident out on J platform. Lost Gimenez, and Nero’s been hurt. Weather was too bad to do the extraction until today, but now we have our window. Reason we thawed you, actually. I’m taking over from Gimenez, so you have to cover for me here.”
“You have a labour shortage, so you brought me out of hibernation?”
“That about covers it,” Da Silva said. “Clausen figured it wouldn’t hurt for you to come along for the ride, get you up to speed.”
Clausen flicked a bank of switches in the ceiling. Overhead, the rotor began to turn.
“I guess you have something faster than helicopters, for longer journeys,” Gaunt said.
“Nope,” Clausen answered. “Other than some boats, helicopters is pretty much it.”
“What about intercontinental travel?”
“There isn’t any.”
“This isn’t the world I was expecting!” Gaunt said, straining to make himself heard.
Da Silva leaned around and motioned to the headphones dangling from the seat back. Gaunt put them on and fussed with the microphone until it was in front of his lips.
“I said this isn’t the world I was expecting.”
“Yeah,” Da Silva said. “I heard you the first time.”
The rotor reached takeoff speed. Clausen eased the helicopter into the air, the rooftop landing pad falling away below. They scudded sideways, nose down, until they had cleared the side of the building. The walls plunged vertically, Gaunt’s guts twisting at the dizzying transition. It hadn’t been a building at all, at least not the kind he had been thinking of. The landing pad was on top of a square-ish, industrial-looking structure about the size of a large office block, hazed in scaffolding and gangways, prickly with cranes and chimneys and otherwise unrecognisable protuberances, the structure in turn rising out of the sea on four elephantine legs, the widening bases of which were being ceaselessly pounded by waves. It was an oil rig or production platform of some kind, or at least, something repurposed from one.
It wasn’t the only one either. The rig they had taken off from was but one in a major field, rig after rig stretching all the way to the gloomy, grey, rain-hazed horizon. There were dozens, and he had the sense that they didn’t stop at the horizon.
“What are these for? I know it’s not oil. There can’t be enough of it left to justify a drilling operation on this scale. The reserves were close to being tapped out when I went under.”
“Dormitories,” Da Silva said. “Each of these platforms holds maybe ten thousand sleepers, give or take. They built them out at sea because we need OTEC power to run them, using the heat difference between surface water and deep ocean, and it’s much easier if we don’t have to run those power cables inland.”
“Coming back to bite us now,” Clausen said.
“If we’d gone inland, they’d have sent land-dragons instead. They’re just adapting to whatever we do,” Da Silva said pragmatically.
They sped over oily, roiling waters. “Is this really Patagonia?” Gaunt asked.
“Patagonia offshore sector,” Da Silva said. “Sub-sector fifteen. That’s our watch. There are about two hundred of us, and we look after about a hundred rigs, all told.”
Gaunt ran the numbers twice, because he couldn’t believe what they were telling him. “That’s a million sleepers.”
“Ten million in the whole of Patagonia offshore,” Clausen said. “That surprise you, Gaunt? That ten million people managed to achieve what you and your precious Few did, all those years back?”
“I suppose not,” he said, as the truth of it sunk in. “Over time the cost of the process would have decreased, becoming available to people of lesser means. The merely rich, rather than the super-rich. But it was never going to be something available to the masses. Ten million, maybe. Beyond that? Hundreds of millions? I’m sorry, but the economics just don’t stack up.”
“It’s a good thing we don’t have economics, then,” Da Silva said.
“Patagonia’s just a tiny part of the whole,” said Clausen. “Two hundred other sectors out there, just as large as this one. That’s two billion sleepers, near as it matters.”
Gaunt shook his head. “That can’t be right. The global population was only eight billion when I went under, and the trend was downwards! You can’t tell me that a quarter of the human race is hibernating.”
“Maybe it would help if I told you that the current popula
tion of the Earth is also two billion, near as it matters,” Clausen said. “Almost everyone’s asleep. There’s just a handful of us still awake, playing caretaker, watching over the rigs and OTEC plants.”
“Four hundred thousand waking souls,” Da Silva said. “But it actually feels like a lot less than that, since we mostly keep to our assigned sectors.”
“You know the real irony?” Clausen said. “We’re the ones who get to call ourselves the Few now. The ones who aren’t sleeping.”
“That doesn’t leave anyone to actually do anything,” Gaunt said. “There’s no point in everyone waiting for a cure for death if there’s no one alive to do the hard work of making it happen.”
Clausen turned round to look back at him, her expression telling him everything he needed to know about her opinion of his intellect. “It isn’t about immortality. It’s about survival. It’s about doing our bit for the war effort.”
“What war?” Gaunt asked.
“The one going on all around us,” Clausen said. “The one you made happen.”
THEY CAME IN to land on another rig, one of five that stood close enough to each other to be linked by cables and walkways. The sea was still heavy, huge waves dashing against the concrete piers on which the rigs were supported. Gaunt peered intently at the windows and decks but saw no sign of human activity on any of the structures. He thought back to what Clausen and Da Silva had told him, each time trying to find a reason why they might be lying to him, why they might be going to pathological lengths to hoax him about the nature of the world into which he had woken. Maybe there was a form of mass entertainment that involved waking sleepers such as himself and putting them through the emotional wringer, presenting them with the grimmest possible scenarios, ramping up the misery until they cracked, and only then pulling aside the grey curtains to reveal that, in marvellous point of fact, life in the twenty-third century really was every bit as blue-skied and utopian as he had hoped. That didn’t seem very likely, though.
Yet what kind of war required people to be put to sleep in their billions? And why was the caretaker force, the four hundred thousand waking individuals, stretched so ridiculously thin? Clearly the rigs were largely automated, but it had still been necessary to pull him out of sleep because someone else had died in the Patagonia offshore sector. Why not just have more caretakers awake in the first place, so that the system was able to absorb some losses?
With the helicopter safely down on the pad, Clausen and Da Silva told him to follow them into the depths of the other rig. There was very little about it to distinguish it from the one where Gaunt had been woken, save for the fact that it was almost completely deserted, with the only activity coming from skulking repair robots. They were clearly very simple machines, not much smarter than automatic window-cleaners. Given the years of his life that he had given over to the dream of artificial intelligence, it was dismaying to see how little progress—if any—had been made.
“We need to get one thing straight,” Gaunt said, when they were deep into the humming bowels of the rig. “I didn’t start any wars. You’ve got the wrong guy here.”
“You think we mixed up your records?” Clausen asked. “How did we know about your work on thinking machines?”
“Then you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. I had nothing do to with wars or the military.”
“We know what you did,” she said. “The years spent trying to build a true, Turing-compliant artificial intelligence. A thinking, conscious machine.”
“Except it was a dead end.”
“Still led to some useful spin-offs, didn’t it?” she went on. “You cracked the hard problem of language comprehension. Your systems didn’t just recognise speech. They were able to understand it on a level no computer system had ever achieved before. Metaphor, simile, sarcasm and understatement, even implication by omission. Of course, it had numerous civilian applications, but that isn’t where you made your billions.” She looked at him sharply.
“I created a product,” Gaunt said. “I simply made it available to whoever could afford it.”
“Yes, you did. Unfortunately, your system turned out to be the perfect instrument of mass surveillance for every despotic government still left on the planet. Every basket-case totalitarian state still in existence couldn’t get its hands on your product fast enough. And you had no qualms whatsoever about selling it, did you?”
Gaunt felt a well-rehearsed argument bubbling up from subconscious. “No communication tool in history has ever been a single-edged sword.”
“And that excuses you, does it?” Clausen asked. Da Silva had been silent in this exchange, observing the two of them as they continued along corridors and down stairwells.
“I’m not asking for absolution. But if you think I started wars, if you think I’m somehow responsible for this…” He gestured at his surroundings. “This fucked up state of affairs. Then you’re very, very wrong.”
“Maybe you weren’t solely responsible,” Clausen said. “But you were certainly complicit. You and everyone else who pursued the dream of artificial intelligence. Driving the world toward the edge of that cliff, without a thought for the consequences. You had no idea what you were unleashing.”
“I’m telling you, we unleashed nothing. It didn’t work.”
They were walking along a suspended gangway now, crossing from one side to the other of some huge space somewhere inside the rig. “Take a look down,” Da Silva said. Gaunt didn’t want to; he’d never been good with heights and the drainage holes in the floor were already too large for comfort. He forced himself anyway. The four walls of the cubic chamber held rack upon rack of coffin-sized white boxes, stacked thirty high and surrounded by complicated plumbing, accompanied by an equally complex network of access catwalks, ladders and service tracks. Even as Gaunt watched, a robot whirred up to one of the boxes and extracted a module from one end of it, before tracking sideways to deal with another coffin.
“In case you thought we were yanking your chain,” Clausen said. “This is real.”
The hibernation arrangements for the original Few could not have been more different. Like an Egyptian Pharoah buried with his worldly possessions, Gaunt had required an entire crypt full of bulky, state-of-the-art cryopreservation and monitoring systems. At any one time, as per his contract with Sleepover, he would have been under the direct care of several living doctors. Just housing a thousand of the Few needed a building the size of a major resort hotel, with about the same power requirements. By contrast this was hibernation on a crushing, maximally efficient industrial scale. People in boxes, stacked like mass-produced commodities, tended by the absolute minimum of living caretakers. He was seeing maybe less than a thousand sleepers in this one chamber, but from that point on Gaunt had no doubt whatsoever that the operation could be scaled up to encompass billions.
All you needed were more rooms like this. More robots and more rigs. Provided you had the power, and provided the planet did not need anyone to do anything else, it was eminently doable.
There was no one to grow crops or distribute food. But that didn’t matter because there was almost no one left awake to need feeding. No one to orchestrate the intricate, flickering web of the global finance system. But that didn’t matter because there was no longer anything resembling an economy. No need for a transport infrastructure because no one travelled. No need for communications, because no one needed to know what was going on beyond their own sector. No need for anything really, save the absolute, life and death essentials. Air to breathe. Rations and medicine for less than half a million people. A trickle of oil, the world’s last black hiccough, to keep the helicopters running.
Yes, it could be done. It could easily be done.
“There’s a war,” Da Silva said. “It’s been going on, in some shape or form, since before you went under. But it’s probably not the kind of war you’re thinking of.”
“And where do these people come into it, these sleepers?”
“They have no choice,” Clausen said. “They have to sleep. If they don’t, we all die.”
“We, as in…?”
“You, me. Us,” Da Silva said. “The entire human species.”
THEY COLLECTED NERO and the corpse from a sick bay several levels down from the freezer chamber. The corpse was already bagged, a silver-wrapped mummy on a medical trolley. Rather than the man Gaunt had been expecting, Nero turned out to be a tall, willowy woman with an open, friendly face and a mass of salmon-red curls.
“You the newbie, right?” she asked, lifting a coffee mug in salute.
“I guess,” Gaunt said uneasily.
“Takes some adjustment, I know. Took a good six months before I realised this wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to me. But you’ll get there eventually.” One of Nero’s hands was bandaged, a white mitten with a safety pin stuck through the dressing. “Take it from me, though. Don’t go back inside the box.” Then she glanced at Clausen. “You are giving him a chance about this, aren’t you?”
“Of course,” Clausen said. “That’s the deal.”
“Occurs to me sometimes maybe it would be easier if there wasn’t a deal, you know,” Nero said. “Like, we just give them their duties and to hell with it.”
“You wouldn’t have been too pleased if we didn’t give you the choice,” Da Silva said. He was already taking off his coat, settling in for the stay.
“Yeah, but what did I know back then? Six months feels like half a lifetime ago now.”
“When did you go under?” Gaunt asked.
“Twenty ninety-two. One of the first hundred million.”
“Gaunt’s got a headstart on you,” Clausen said. “Guy was one of the Few. The original Few, the first two hundred thousand.”
“Holy shit. That is some headstart.” Nero narrowed her eyes. “He up to speed on things yet? My recollection is they didn’t know what they were getting into back then.”
Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds Page 66